The Humble Bundle Mojam 60-Hour Coding Marathon Charity Drive

The latest Humble Bundle is something just a bit different than normal, to say the least. Mojang took a poll over the week as to what kind of game they should create in a 60-hour coding fest, and combined the first and last place winners into a genre mashup. Catacomb Snatch will be, once it’s done in 15 hours, “a real-time strategy shoot ’em up, with a steampunk, ancient Egypt theme!” Seriously, how can you not love a description like that?

Like all the Humble Bundles, Catacomb Snatch is a pay-what-you-want affair, but you should dig a little deeper if possible because all proceeds are 100% charity. Child’s Play, the Red Cross, charity:water, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation all take a cut of the total, with Mojang, Oxeye Game Studio, and Wolfire all donating their weekends to the cause. You can watch a live stream of the action here.

With three developers and the word Bundle prominently featured, it’s not unreasonable to expect more than just Mojang’s contribution. Wolfire is riffing on the same thematic idea as Mojang, creating another RTS shooter in a steampunk Egypt (it’s not possible to oversaturate that genre!), while Oxeye took the second place winner and loser in the poll to frankenstein together a dungeon-crawl beat ’em up in a post-apocalyptic WWII setting. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to be awesome.

So, that’s three games created by three teams over 60 hours, with all proceeds going to charity. The clock is still ticking at the time of this writing, and while the current take of $315,000 is nice, notch has promised to shave his beard at $500,000. You know what you need to do, so start donating.

**UPDATE**

The final tally came in at $447,914.39. Looks like notch gets to keep his beard, but four charities get a hair over $100,000 apiece.

At the moment, the Mojang crew are uploading their completed projects, but it looks like Oxeye and Wolfire have a little more to do. 60 hours, 60-ish hours, it’s close enough. All told, not bad for a weekend’s work.

**UPDATE #2**

The total take keeps going up, as it turns out, because 60 hours is maybe just a little too little time to make a decent game. As they wrap up the details and put final tweaks, you can still donate. If you haven’t already (and somehow manage to read this in time) now wouldn’t be a bad time at all to correct that little oversight.